At Thursday night's debate in South Carolina,
Newt Gingrich painted himself as a friend of a free and open Internet,
but in the past he's talked up pretty radical proposals to curtail free
speech online.

The question Thursday was about the Stop Online Piracy Act,
legislation that has the support of the entertainment industry and
powerful members of the House and Senate, but is now on life support after running into a firestorm of criticism from Internet users, tech companies like Google, and activists who shut down websites in protest earlier this week.

"You have virtually everybody who's technologically advanced, including, you know, Google and
YouTube and Facebook and all the folks, who say this is going to
totally mess up the Internet, and the bill in its current form is
written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally
unacceptable. Well, I favor freedom," Gingrich said. "The idea that
we're going to preemptively have the government start censoring the
Internet on behalf of giant corporations' economic interests strikes me
as exactly the wrong thing to do."